Tag Archives | Voting

For the second time in just five primary states, the Republican Party, with the assistance of the national corporate news media, is raising questions about the legitimacy of this season’s primary election system. First, the Iowa Republican Party and the entire American media knowingly reported the wrong Iowa Caucus results with the wrong person being declared the winner. Last night, it appears the same thing may be happening in Nevada. And again like Iowa, critics are accusing the GOP of suspicious activity.
Perhaps it’s indicative that the beneficiary of these recurring vote counting “mistakes” always seems to be former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. He’s just happens to be the same man that both the Republican Party establishment and the four corporations that own all of America’s news media outlets are actively supporting.

I find it interesting that Newt canceled events in SC due to lack of interest, but lo and behold he has somehow become the victor….

“Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here, here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on the living in the land of freedom. Here you go America – you are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!” – Bill Hicks

The voting systems in use for the nation’s first three all-important electoral contests in the 2012 primary — from Iowa to New Hampshire to Saturday’s South Carolina Primary — go from pretty great to intolerably horrible.

It’s official, or is it? Once again the establishment is showing it’s cards in an obvious attempt to defraud Ron Paul from the nomination, as Iowa GOP ‘officials’ purposely disrupt and permanently invalidate the 2012 Iowa Caucus.

The official Caucus website, in conjunction with the Des Moines Register, had to come forward Thursday to claim the official results can “never be certified” after 8 different precincts turn up invalid results due to “missing votes” and changing stories.

On January 10th, Project Veritas reporters walked into New Hampshire Polling Locations during the Presidential Primaries, saying dead people's names. We stated the name of a dead person we got from the NH obituaries. The names of the deceased were both Registered Republican and Democrats And in almost every case, saying a dead person's name, we were handed a ballot to cast a vote. We used no misrepresentation and no false pretenses. in fact, in almost every case, we insisted we show ID and they insisted that we vote without showing ID.

Putin pushes the envelope, and points the way towards the future of political campaigning, by making pulling the voting lever seem to be some sort of sex act. Via Politico:

In a new ad for Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party, the weirdness of that country's fake democracy is on full display.
The ad conflates voting and sex in a way that makes no sense but has great production values and a compelling beat. The slogan: "Let's do it together."

To American voters, it’s an all-too familiar dilemma: do you cast your lot with the candidate most likely to win, or risk spoiling the election by supporting the third-party candidate in whom you actually believe? What if, instead of choosing one candidate, voters were instead given the opportunity to rate each potential office-holder, in the same way that Olympic judges score athletes? Brian Dunning at Skeptoid takes an interesting look at the mathematics of voting systems:

In the 1969 film Putney Swope, members of the board of executives were prohibited from voting for themselves, so they all voted for the one board member they were sure nobody else would vote for. Ergo, this free, democratic election produced a chairman that no voter wanted.

In a perfect democracy, everyone gets an equal opportunity to vote, and equal representation. Therefore, we hold elections to let everyone have their say, to either vote representatives into office, or to enact certain laws.

Do you think people believe that they only have two choices in regards to governance? Break free from the ketchup-vs.-mustard political paradigm, and reach for the tangy BBQ sauce of third parties. Via Parapolitical:

The current issue of Ballot Access News reports a nearly 300-percent increase in individual giving to third parties in the United States during Q1/Q2 2011 versus the same time period in 2010. The data is based on state income tax returns from the thirteen states that let taxpayers designate a donation to their favorite political party. By comparison, the Democrat Party registered only a 2.4-percent bump in giving, while the Republican Party saw a 2.6-percent decline.

In the state of Wisconsin, you may be denied the ability to vote for lack of sufficient recent "bank activity". A woman surreptitiously filmed the interactions as her 18-year-old son leaps through hurdle after hurdle in an attempt to get a constitutionally-guaranteed state ID so that he could vote. At the DMV, the pair is told that voter IDs were not issued when voters' bank accounts did not show enough “activity.” The clerk had no answer when asked what would happen in the case of a resident who was homeless or unemployed, or too poor to maintain the minimum balance required for a checking account.

Flip on cable news, and within twenty minutes the host will cite the latest survey as proof of which candidates should run for office and which foreign enemy we must now smite. Writing for New Left Media, John Brissenden tears apart the idea of opinion polls as a gauge for determining what anyone truly wants. The public may respond to opinion polls, but it’s the media, business, and political elite who compose the questions:

From its inception a century ago, and in its current construction, the terrain of ‘public opinion’ is far from being a neutral space where a representative democracy deliberates and resolves issues. At best, ‘public opinion’, as represented in opinion polls, is a deeply flawed mechanism for gauging the extent of wider support for a particular cause. At worst, it is hostile territory, constructed and owned by the ruling class.

In the 1920s, polling pioneers such as James Gallup advocated polls as a means of capturing and expressing the public will, in a more scientific – and therefore representative – way than, for example, pressure groups.

Via the Guardian, an intriguing concept — children are citizens with a stake in the future (the largest stake in the future!) yet their interests are not adequately represented in elections. Is allowing parents to vote on their behalf a way to counter the disproportionate power of the elderly? Hungary is set to find out:

“Some 20% of society are children…This is quite a considerable group that is left out of representation. The interests of these future generations are not represented in decision-making. We know at first it seems an unusual idea, but in the 50s it was unusual to give votes to black people; 100 years ago, it was unusual to give votes to women.”

In a move that would be unprecedented in a modern democracy, Hungary’s new government is considering giving mothers with small children extra votes in elections.

The conservative Fidesz party has made several controversial decisions since coming to power on a populist rightwing agenda, including a crackdown on the media, but the latest proposal could be prove to be its most contentious.